If you followed Awesome Games Done Quick, you may already be familiar with the world of speedrunning, a community that uses a combination of high-level play, strategic optimization and movement glitches to race through games at breakneck speeds. A full speedrun of Super Mario 64 only takes around one hour and 44 minutes, for instance-- a tiny fraction of the dozens of hours that it takes a player like myself to complete the game. Yet when Scott Buchanan plays Super Mario 64, it might take dozens of hours to reach a single star: the Youtuber plays the game with the self-imposed challenge of avoiding pressing the A button.

As you can imagine, trying to play a platformer without jumping makes it a little difficult. How difficult exactly? To answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes. In his most recent video, Scott explains a new approach for getting to the Watch for Rolling Rocks star that, among other things, involves walking in place for twelve hours to collect enough momentum to tunnel through into copies of the original course that exist out of bounds. All to improve on his previous method by half an A press, and yes, that’s totally a thing.

Fitting most indie games into a clean and tidy category or genre is usually an exercise in futility. Many indie studios make evocative, surprising, and entirely unique experiences that you just can’t find anywhere else. Not many teams are able to deliver something completely different every time they make a game, though. That’s why Andres, Carlos, and Edmundo Bordeu, three brothers that grew up and make games together, are so impressive.

Donna Prior: The Life of a Community ManagerJan 14th, 2016 at 10:00 AM by DavidJagneaux

In its purest and simplest form, a Community Manager is a brand advocate. In the world of online game community management, Community Managers are in charge of not only promoting the brand but also for being the liaison between developers and the community. And when the community you’re in charge of happens to be an extremely vocal fanbase, life isn’t exactly easy. That much is clear to Donna Prior, Community Manager Team Lead at En Masse Entertainment.

Anthony Burch: diversity is common senseJan 4th, 2016 at 10:00 AM by RichardJ87

There are many moral and philosophical arguments to be made about why diversity in games matters. Unfortunately, there are also many people who remain unmoved by those arguments. Trying to change people's minds by appealing to empathy can be challenging, which is why Borderlands 2 lead writer Anthony Burch is proposing a new approach to diversify games.

Game Addiction: Knowing When to DisconnectDec 29th, 2015 at 12:00 PM by RichardJ87

Games are fun. For most people who play games, that's a pretty obvious statement. Games can help us relax, connect with other people, and even exercise our brains. All in all, games can be a good use of our leisure time. But what happens when we start to spend too much time gaming? At what point does gaming stop being a healthy activity and start to have damaging consequences? Is there such a thing as "gaming addiction"?

How to address the lost history of girls' gamesNov 4th, 2015 at 12:00 PM by CarliVelocci

I had a moment during the “Looking back at ‘girls games’” keynote panel at this year’s Indiecade where I remembered a whole piece of my childhood that I had forgotten. I don’t know how, but somehow I had erased my memories of playing Purple Moon’s games on Windows 95.

Wise Words from a Twitch PartnerOct 2nd, 2015 at 12:00 PM by WonderfunkJones

Twitch.tv is still new to a lot of people, but it's grown big enough in recent years to support its own convention at San Francisco's Moscone center. ZAM had the rare-but-cherished chance to sit down with a Twitch partner known as Miss Molly Lolly. She shared some insights about TwitchCon, the new convention, and what it takes to be a streamer.

Early Access gets closer and closer for the upcoming MMO Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade, yet when we look at their feature list there's still so much left to learn about. When Behaviour Interactive has talked about the game in general up to this point, they've focused on the game's PvP content. This makes sense - "In the grim dark future, there is only war" and all of that. The source material is a tabletop miniatures warfare game, so not focusing on the PvP content would be shocking to say the least. There's more to the world of Eternal Crusade than the battle between Orks, Space Marines, Chaos Marines and Eldar though. In our recent interview with Senior Producer Nathan Richardsson, they finally start to talk about Tyrannids and that up-till-now untouched portion of their game, PvE content.

Previously discussed following E3 last month, WildStar will be getting a stat overhaul with this fall's F2P update. The refactoring will simplify things, leaving clear primary and secondary stats for players to customize their gameplay experience with.

This morning Carbine released its latest Deep Dive covering the stat revamp, and we took the opportunity to pose a few questions about it to Lead Designer Steven Engle.

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade has seen various changes over the past year, and the team at Behaviour Interactive is focused on delivering a quality experience with open feedback flowing from its players. We spoke to Senior Producer Nathan Richardsson at E3 last month about game engine changes, console versions, and the upcoming Early Access.

Early (Founder's) Access, which Nathan likened to "the equivalent of Closed Alpha", is coming this summer and will have one 32+ player map, two game modes (siege and assault), destructible objects, and more. For the Space Marines faction with its Dark Angel sub-faction three vehicles will be available: the Rhino, Predator, and the Vindicator, and four classes will be playable: Tactical, Assault, Devastator, and the Apothecary. The Chaos Space Marine faction with its Word Bearers sub-faction will have the Chaos Predator, Chaos Rhino, and Vindicator vehicles, as well as the Havoc, Raptor, Sorcerer, and Tactical classes.